Attila Kagan of the Huns from the kind of Velsung. Сергей Юрьевич Соловьев

Both wheels of a two-wheeled wooden arba from the Watchtower grave of the pit culture near the Dnieper city (III millennium BC) were made of a solid piece of wood, cut longitudinally, with round holes for the axle and thick hubs.

      In the Samara region, a burial place was found for two people of antiquity 3,800 years old. The bodies are laid next to each other, face to face. As analysis of the genetic material showed, both people died from a plague stick, which had a genetic type similar to Justinian’s plague, and had the ability to live in fleas and thus be transmitted rapidly from person to person. Given that the plague stick from Samara is the oldest example of such a mutation in the plague, scientists have confirmed that massive population migration from the Yamnaya culture reached Europe, resulting in the culture of cord ceramics, and, in Central Asia and Altai, the Afanasyev culture. Analyzes of the remains of other European cultures – Srubnaya, Sintashtinsky, Potapovskaya and Andronovskaya – confirm that the plague stick has genetically linked lines to the one found near the village of Mikhailovsky.These cultures are an example of the reverse migration carried out by the farmers of these crops from Europe, up to Central Asia. The yamnaya culture originates from the Khvalynsk culture in the middle reaches of the Volga and from the Srednestogov culture in the middle reaches of the Dnieper, and it is also genetically called the funnel-shaped cup culture. Yamnaya culture gives way to Poltava. In the west, the pit culture is replaced by a catacomb culture. In the east there are Andronovo and carcass cultures. Kemi-Obinsky culture of Crimea is a derivative of the Yamnaya culture.

      And in the Yamnaya culture there is already a rite of neutralization of the dead. Paired pit burial Tamar-Utkul VIII. The upper skeleton is abundantly sprinkled with ocher, the lower one is dissected and placed at the feet. Speaking about the dismemberment of the dead among the Yamnaya tribes, one should also mention something similar to the custom of demembration. The rite of demember, in its basic understanding, means the deliberate displacement of the bones of the human skeleton from its original position and placing them either in disorder or in the order directly opposite to the original position in which the deceased was at the time of burial. Not taking into account the cases when the dissected skeletons play an accompanying role in undisturbed bones, it can be reliably judged that the de-migration noted in the burials of the yamnaya culture of the region is a sign of a certain social stratum of society in the early Bronze Age.

      However, the fact that to the east of the Dniester the yamnaya burial places with the use of reingumation is much less common than on the territory of the Prut-Dniester interfluve. This observation, to a certain extent, can serve as evidence that the demembration and the custom of laying the bones of a buried “package” is a narrowly local sign for the pit culture of the Dniester-Danube region.

      No traces of the archaeological influence of the yamnaya culture in South Asia, including Tajikistan, were found. Linguistic studies also suggest that the languages of the Indo-Iranian group could come to South Asia not 3000 – 2500 BC, and later – between 2300—1200. BC e. These findings triggered a new search for a source for languages that were distributed during that period. As a result, the study showed that there was no mass migration of steppe nomads to South Asia from the pit culture in the early Bronze Age and the like; however possible. there was a migration from the steppe cultures in the late Bronze Age. Ymnaya were mined for metal in the Kargaly mining and metallurgical center.

      Catacomb culture

      The Catacomb cultural and historical community is an ethnocultural association of the Middle Bronze Age (XXV – XX centuries BC), spread in the steppe and forest-steppe zone from the Urals and the North Caucasus to the lower Danube. It was originally identified as an archaeological culture in 1901—1903. V.A. Gorodtsov.

      Later, researchers identified local options that were identified as independent archaeological cultures. The concept of “catacomb cultural and historical community” was introduced into scientific circulation. It is represented by the monuments of the following catacomb cultures:

      – old katakombnoy (XXV – XXIII centuries. BC.),

      – Donetsk (XXIII – XX centuries BC),

      – Middle Don (XXVIII – XXVII – XX centuries BC),

      – inhulian (XXVIII – XX centuries BC).

      The pioneer of the catacomb culture is V. A. Gorodtsov, who in the years 1901—1903 in the process of studying the barrow antiquities of the Seversky Donets drew attention to the burials in the catacombs – a specific funeral structure consisting of a vertical well (entrance pit), dromos (passage in the form of a corridor) and burial chamber (burial place). In accordance with the design features of the burial structure, the culture allocated by him was called catacomb. Catacomb graves are known in the same region and much later, both in the Sarmatian time and in the graves of the Salt-Maetsk culture. The very structure of the grave, consisting of a dromos and a burial chamber, often with a dome, has parallels in the famous grave of King Hinze in Germany, and probably with the construction of the famous domed tombs of Hellas. The most southern monuments are known in the steppes of Crimea, and the most northern – near Kursk and Yelets. Catacomb settlements are known on the Don (near Rostov), Kibikinskoye near Lugansk, Ternovskoye near Kamyshin on the Volga, etc. Later, researchers turned their attention to the heterogeneity of the catacomb monuments in different territories, which contributed to the identification of a number in the 50—60s of the XX century. local options. With the accumulation of archaeological material, prerequisites were created for understanding local variants as independent archaeological cultures of a single catacomb cultural and historical community, which was ultimately done in the early 1970s by researchers L.S. Klein and O.G. Shaposhnikova.

      The problem of the origin of the catacomb culture (later the catacomb cultural and historical community) was posed at the beginning of the 20th century by V.A. Gorodtsov, almost immediately after the discovery of the burial mounds in the catacombs on the Seversky Donets, but still remains debatable. Researchers discuss autochthonous and migration theories of the origin of tribes of the catacomb community.Adherents of the autochthonous theory believe that the emergence of a catacomb community should be associated with the further development of the local pit population. Proponents of the migration theory suggest that the catacomb tribes genetically go back to the Yamnaya, but arise under the strong migration influence of the populations of the Ciscaucasia. The type of economy of the carriers of the catacomb cultural and historical community was determined by the environmental conditions of the steppe and forest-steppe zones. So, in the steppe pastoral or cattle breeding of the nomadic type, which was based on the breeding of cattle and small cattle, took root. In the forest-steppe, a model of shepherd or stall cattle breeding is prevailing with the predominance of cattle and pigs in the herd. For the catacomb cultural and historical community, tribal villages and low (up to 1 m) burial mounds without cremation are characteristic. Catacomb funeral device, ritual ceramic incense burners, ornament in the form of a cord stamp, flat-bottomed goblets, crouched corpse on one side. In the burials there are wooden carts. Ceramic implements carry elements of the culture of spherical amphoras and cord ceramics in Central and Eastern Europe.

      Temporal lobed rings Blackened tableware with a spiral ornament

      The ceramics are also blackened, with a relief pattern, often spiral-shaped, which brings them closer to the Trypillian ones, but people of the catacomb culture didn’t apply the dishes, but squeezed it out. This brings the ceramics of the catacomb culture closer to the same Middle Hellenic one.

      Minoyan ceramics of Crete.

      Catacomb pottery differs from the primitive and uniform in the form of dishes of ancient yamnaya culture. Known flat-bottomed pots with convex sides and a narrowed neck,